People often use pesticides on fruits and veggies to get rid of bugs and worms that eat them. But it’s been known for years that these pesticides have a lot of chemicals and ingredients that are bad for people. While some chemicals and herbicides are illegal in the US, farmers will still use others that are just as harmful.
For many years, Consumer Reports has been looking into chemicals and how they affect food. At Consumer Reports, James E. Rogers is in charge of food safety. He said, “It’s two steps forward and one step back, and sometimes even two steps back.”
Consumer Reports just released a full review of chemicals used on crops after looking at data from seven years. They looked at nearly sixty different kinds of fruits and veggies, including fresh, dried, and canned ones.
The study found that chemicals are very dangerous for 20% of the crops they looked at. Many people liked peaches, bell peppers, green beans, potatoes, and strawberries, so those were some of the options they looked into. In fact, the study showed that green beans still had chemicals from a pesticide that hadn’t been legal in the US for ten years still on them.
Despite all of this, the report did show that most of the crops did not have any pesticide residue left over, and almost all of the organic options did not have any residue either. Rogers says this makes it easier to find the problems and come up with specific answers.
Information for Consumer Reports’ study came from the Environmental Protection Agency, which keeps track of information about chemicals. Pesticides in most fruits and vegetables don’t pose a high risk, and the EPA says that people can still eat a lot of these foods every day without getting sick. People say that kids and pregnant women should eat less than ten foods because they are more likely to make you sick. Other people should also be aware of how much of these foods they eat.
